


Towards Nod

by rabbitprint



Category: Bible (Old Testament)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-10-22
Updated: 2006-10-22
Packaged: 2017-10-07 14:47:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,972
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/66175
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rabbitprint/pseuds/rabbitprint
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cain, Lilith. Rated for various sex and possible wrong things.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Towards Nod

**Author's Note:**

> _Various inaccuracies depending on what editions of the Bible you are reading. Prompted by Laylah._

He saw her on the second day, right when the first taste of permanency was settling in, but before rebellion had left.

"Look at that." Her shadow fell across his leg. There was a thorn in his foot that felt the size of a mountain, and perversely, he had been hoping all this time that the bush had been blighted for its audacity. "Another one of Adam's discards."

At home, they had told him about the creature with a human face that prowled on the outskirts of their campfire: a First, just as Adam was a First and Cain himself was a First, but Eve was not even though they pretended. His mother had been precluded by the same beast that is speaking to him now, and each time Cain had been tucked into the rank, warm hides of his bedding, he had smiled to know the monsters were on the outside.

Before he could stop her, her hands were on his brow: hot fingers stroking his skin, parting his hair.

"How unfair," she pouted. Her lips were very plump. Looking at them distracted Cain away from hitting her, which was his first instinct once he realized what she was up to. "He gave you a _Mark._ He didn't give _me_ a Mark."

"Maybe because you weren't important enough." His voice was a rasp. There wasn't anyone else to speak to out in the wilderness, and he'd already worn his throat raw from shouting at his grandfather.

Her mouth curved up. "Maybe."

She was much too nonchalant for his taste. All the beasts of the field had given way before him, lowering their heads and flaring their nostrils with distaste; even the meekest of creatures had refused his touch. "The Mark states that no one can kill me," he informed her, just in case ignorance had been her shield. "Lest vengeance be settled with them sevenfold."

The woman absorbed the decree with pursed lips, flapping her hand at his bangs. "How strange." She leaned forward, squinting at the symbols on his forehead. Her breasts dangled in his face. When he took an automatic breath to order her away, the air was full of the ripe smell of her body. "It looks to _me_ as if it says you have simply lost your knack for the plow, and so are forced to wander."

He blinked at that, wondering if she fully understood human speech; wondering, too, if the prospect of destruction mattered to her. "It means," he stressed anyway, "that no one is allowed to harm me."

She leaned back at last, tapping two fingers against her chin. "How boring." No fear had entered her voice; no wariness either. Instead, there was only a bored, disappointed drawl. "Not even if you ask?"

"I would never want that."

She smiled, and suddenly a cold hole opened in his stomach, as if that phrase were a magical incantation that dissolved the mask of humanity off her bones. "You will. Before I am done," she continued, her voice smug and sleek with its own confidence, "you will ask me to hurt you."

"Never. And certainly not for the one named Lilith," he accused suddenly, unwilling to tolerate her belief that she had the advantage. "I have been warned about your games."

Her eyebrows shot up, but the shock was false, decorating a confidence that never wavered. "Have you?" came the question; it was flush with amusement. "Adam would not consent to being dominated. Perhaps his son will have better sense."

He thought she would turn away there and depart, but her fingers danced once more across his forehead, sliding down to caress his cheek. "It is not very often that I encounter a human man with the writ of God upon his brow," she offered quietly. "Would you lie with me, son of Adam?"

Before he could answer, she had moved forward, straddling his leg and shoving aside the foot that had been wounded. He caught it before the heel could hit the ground; biting back a grimace, he began to scowl in warning, but she had already taken one of his hands and deftly slipped it between her legs. Her hair slithered in a curtain around her shoulders as she moaned, guiding his palm so that she could rock against it, pressing his fingers against folds of skin.

At first he could not distinguish what exactly he was supposed to be touching. His mother had grown bitter on the subject of modesty, insistent on wearing a length of goathide to cover her lower half at all times -- and Lilith did not. A patch of tight hairs curled against his palm; then she bent his fingers upwards and something parted beneath them, so that moisture slid along his knuckles and he was stroking wet flesh.

She leaned harder against him, shamelessly arousing herself in the middle of the road.

When she came, she did so with a savage thrust of her body: a long curl of her spine that started at her shoulders and ended up with his fingers inside her, partially buried as unseen muscles flexed around them.

He pulled back as soon as she let him. One of her hands was damp with her own fluids where she had guided his hand into her; the other snaked its way down to his loincloth, pulling it aside with brisk motions. She glanced down only once as she stretched her other leg out, spreading her hips across his lap.

"You are not the size of your father," she commented smugly, and then lowered herself onto him.

When she left, swinging her hair back over her shoulders so that it whispered into a coarse, dark cloak, he watched the direction that she took.

* * *

Hunger was his motivating force when he finally turned down the path to Lilith's camp: hunger and curiosity. Though he could harvest fruit off the trees, doing so blighted the living plants underneath his touch. Leaves withered; young twigs curled back upon their branches, repelled by his presence. If he died from starvation, he found himself debating morbidly, then what would be blamed?

Lilith's tent was filled with the smell of stew when he approached. It drew him closer despite his better senses. No beasts stood guard; no monster barred his route. If there was an obstacle that warded danger away, then it bypassed Cain and left him be.

Inside the wide bowl, roots simmered alongside chunks of greasy meat. Chunks of what looked like potato bobbed to the surface of the brew as Lilith stirred it, patiently crouched near the side of the firepit.

"You hunt?" The question sounded foolish when he thought about it, and then his stomach churned at the tantalizing scent of the meat.

She tilted the spoon towards him invitingly. "My children bring me sustenance, when I cannot be bothered to find it myself." She sounded so matter-of-fact for a moment that he forgot the type of creature she was; then, as she continued to watch him, a smile parted her lips and showed the tip of her tongue. "Do you want some?"

He accepted without haggling. Like the rudest of guests, he claimed a bowl and a seat and a spoon, trying to ignore the feel of finely carved wood. At home, he had been the one to whittle down the branches into eating implements; his best efforts had produced results which seemed crude when compared to the sleek curves of Lilith's spoons.

When she set her bowl aside and held open the flap to her tent, he followed.

* * *

His first experience with her had been hurried, rushed; it had been performed in broad daylight, fit for any stranger's eyes to see. The innards of her tent were darker. Very little of the sun's rays penetrated from the outside, and stepping within her lair felt like entering a furred cave.

Their first argument came when they fought over position. They had ended up tangled together in her bedding, wrapped in a mixture of poorly cured hides and linen, and when the time came for her to place herself upon the ground, she balked. "Like your _father_ would take me?" she had laughed, and the sound was enough to put his teeth on edge.

When he insisted, leaning her roughly onto her back, Lilith only sighed in boredom. He thrust into her clumsily, but could not ignore her blatant disinterest, her utter lack of reaction -- as if the rutting were of no more notice than a minor itch upon her scalp. Nothing he could do caused her to either gasp in lust or in fear; nor did she turn her face away in shame, only studying the ceiling of the cave, entertained by her own private thoughts.

He finished off in a half-hearted jerk of his hips that felt as satisfying as one of Abel's ewes.

She stretched, languid, and grabbed a fold of the hides to wipe herself off. "I should have known not to expect too much in the way of fornication from one of Adam's boys," she purred, yawning with a long stretch of her arms.

His first response sounded more like a cross between a cough and a laugh. Then he regained control over his voice, filling each word with contemptuous scorn. "And you had expectations?"

"That position hardly seemed enjoyable to you either," the woman observed. Then she tilted her head; fat hanks of hair slid along her neck. "Or would you prefer to mount me in the same fashion as was found in the fields of your brother?"

He did not know if she meant the sheep or more; her words tiptoed around direct implication. Too fervent of a denial would only fuel her machinations. Still, he could not keep the fluster from his voice. "What do you know of such things?"

"I know that you have never felt the pain of being taken. Or," she continued, comfortable with her own blasphemy, "the pleasure that comes with it, if done in the proper way. Your brother had studied the ram -- he knew what to expect. You knew only of the seed and soil, and how the ground will lie down tame underneath the plow."

"If you know so much," he challenged, "then show me."

They spent the rest of the night and most of the next day rutting, turning one another sticky with fluid. She ran her mouth across him in ways he had never thought before; her fingers knew him better than even his own. All her clever arts brought him to the brink of climax before she would retreat, teasing him mercilessly until he was sprawled helpless on the hides of her bedding, coated with sweat. Every inch of his skin seemed to shudder under the weight of the air, so sensitive it had become; he could not think of a single part of his body that she had not violated.

When she drew back again, he gasped. "Don't stop."

"If I do any more," she purred, "it will begin to hurt."

"It won't," he vowed, feeling the tension winding itself into his loins, the hot pulse of nerves that lingered just shy of agony.

But she pulled away from him anyway, separating herself by the length of the tent, until she was a wavy blot in the darkness. "Are you asking me to harm you, son of Adam?"

In her words, he heard the dry confidence of a demon.

Rather than choose surrender, he rolled over with a curse, working his fingers until he spent himself across her bed.

* * *

They ate together as the weeks progressed, slept when the nights came. Lilith did not seem in any rush to pitch her camp elsewhere, and Cain had nowhere to go.

Lilith took numerous lovers whenever she had opportunity. None of them ate by her fireside. None of them were invited into her tent to share her bed; if it was her choice to expose herself on the roads and ditches, he did not know. But her business never intruded on him, and her limbs were clean enough when she returned to him, and by this he was content.

He saw, at times, the varied creatures she considered her offspring. Many of them only parodied human form: irregular limbs sprouted from bloated bodies, mixing animal parts at random together. Others were almost normal enough to be beautiful, save for singular deformities. All bowed their heads in deference when they saw their mother, but for Cain, they had no words.

"Do not turn away from them," she chided when she caught him glaring sidelong at a monstrosity with five faces. "If not for your father's tastes in lust, they would have been your kin."

He gave a mocking laugh, staring determinedly at the creature until it hopped away from the camp. "I could never be related to such a beast."

The declaration gave Lilith pause. She swung her hair back over her shoulders as she sorted through the burlap bag which her spawn had brought, unpacking strangely shaped loaves of bread. "Perhaps it's not so bad after all," she allowed, neatly parting their dinner into quadrants. "At least this way, I will not have to worry about your temptations to kill them."

He pushed away from the campfire with an oath of disgust. No destination came to mind; his only desire was to escape. Lilith's manipulations were all the less palatable because they were often true, as if she had gained a power over words that made outright deceptions unnecessary.

She caught up with him at the edge of a grove of trees, whose branches had only begun to show signs of early bloom. They lay in the domain of a farmer; the saplings had been planted in rows, and now that they had grown into maturity, Cain could walk along their lengths and see evidence of pruning.

"The land of Nod lies beyond those hills," she informed him without preamble, lacing her arms around his waist. He could feel the slight bulge of her stomach; which creature had fathered her latest child-to-be, he did not know. "Will you go there?"

He stirred, momentarily distracted by the soft roundness of her body pressing against his spine. "Will I?"

"You can." Swinging around so that she could look him in the eye, Lilith kept him at arm's length, her palms pressed against his shoulders. "You can go and pretend to be among others of your kind, if you wish. But you will not have me there -- you will not have another who has tasted of the Tree, whose breasts run sweet with a milk that is better than honey."

He flushed then, and looked away. "I do not remember such things about my mother."

"But you remember them of me." She cupped her breasts in her hands; they were as ripe as they always had been, endlessly full to feed the army of demons she had mothered. Patiently, her fingers massaged one nipple until it began to leak. She gathered a drop on her fingers and brought it up to her mouth. "You enjoy them of me, Cain, and this too can I promise you: nowhere in Nod will you find another of your kind. Nowhere will you find what I have to offer."

"You only want me for my seed," he spat, struggling away. "And even then, only because of my lineage, which has spurned you once before."

She watched him, unmoved, unruffled. "Vengeance makes a sweet sire. And in all that I did," she added deftly, mockingly, "at least _I_ was not the first one to be named kinslayer."

He shoved her hard; she fell, laughing, against the trunk of a fruit tree. The bark left a dark line of sap along her arm, translucent and sticky. "You can go to Nod," she began, her voice steady, "and make your home as an outcast among foreigners. Or you can stay with me. And every day you are with me, you will wonder what it would have been like, if your mother had never let herself become tempted, or if I had been there in her stead. You would wonder why your father had chosen pride over me. You would wonder, and you would remember, and at the same time, you would know that I am the only home for you."

Expecting mockery, he glanced back towards her -- but she had pressed herself against the tree, both her arms held at her side, tight against the bark. "In Nod, you may find forgetfulness," she warned again, softly, "but that is all you will find."

The words made him queasy. He reached for her. "Stay."

She dodged him as effortlessly as smoke, her waist sliding out from between his fingers. "The memories will bring you pain, kinslayer." For once, her words held nothing of amusement, or guile. "And this will be a true pain, far beyond what we have played at in bed."

He refused to look at the frown twisting her features. "I don't care."

"No one is allowed to hurt you, Cain," she reminded him, her voice lilting and cool. "Not even if you ask."

He ignored the words, grabbed for her again. This time, his fingers latched onto her wrist; he tightened his grip, feeling the delicate bones in her arm shift at the pressure.

Then black wings plunged across his vision. He recoiled automatically, throwing up one hand to shield himself from the attack he was sure would come. The air stirred itself to storm around him. It howled in his ears, drew ice across his skin, and then drew its fury towards the sky.

When nothing struck, he gingerly lowered his defense, peering over his arm.

The grove was empty.

Lilith was gone.

He shivered, and turned towards Nod.


End file.
